city at night

city at night

Thursday, June 23, 2016

The Computer Nightmare Continues

My misadventures with my new computer go from bad to worse!

Yesterday, my friend who had helped me buy the new computer, came over again to see if he could resolve some of the issues that I have been having.  He is not a computer whiz, but he knows more than I.  My first priority was to get the files that I had backed up from the old computer onto the new one.  (These included the thousands of photos from my travels.) He had no better luck than I getting my files, which were stored on an external device, to transfer to the new computer.  After a couple of calls to the manufacturer of the device, he finally managed to transfer them. 

However, I had assumed that my photos would automatically go to my pictures file, documents to the documents file, etc.  Wrong!  The files are on a separate drive.  I guess that basically they are still sitting in the device... it's just that now I am able to access them.  However, it's rather inconvenient to get to them.  I thought, "OK, I'll try copying one of my backed-up picture files and pasting it into the pictures file of the computer."  It worked!  Thinking that the problem was solved, my friend went home. 

I started on the task of moving all of my photos.  I copied a file of from another trip and pasted it into Pictures.  No problem.  OK, to make this less tedious, I copied a half dozen files at once, and tried pasting them.  I received a message that there was no room on the disc for them.  What the heck?!  This new computer is supposed to have a terabyte of space... much more than my old one.  How is it possible that after less than a week my computer is full?

On my previous post, blogger Gary Denness had commented that my computer was suffering from "bloatware".  The manufacturer fills up the computer with a bunch of crap.  I think his diagnosis is correct.  Disc C which contains the Windows operating system is virtually full.  However Disc D, which has a terabyte of space was empty.  I copied the few files that I had transferred over to Pictures, pasted them into Disc D, and then deleted the files in Pictures.  Sure enough, it had freed up a bit of space on Disc C (although it remains almost full).  So my question is, why is would my personal stuff like Pictures, Documents, Music, etc. be on Disc C rather than Disc D where all the space is???

Well, it's almost 10:00 in the morning.  The computer store will be opening, and I am going to call and let them know that this computer is one big headache.  Hopefully they will be able to guide me through a fix over the phone, and I don't have to take it back to the store.  



11 comments:

  1. If you had an external HDD with all your old photos, it should have been a simple matter of dragging and dropping. It sounds like the person who helped you used a file transfer protocol of some sort. Not the way I'd have gone.

    You likely have an SSD (a small very very fast storage drive for the OS and program installations) and then a large HDD for storing all the bulky stuff. This has become the normal way to do things. You wouldn't use an SSD to store photos on in that sort of storage configuration.

    However, the OS will always place document folders of the default drive. You would need to manually change them. All of these isses would still apply if you installed Windows 7, by the by! The biggest issue, still, is all that bloatware though. It's horrible stuff.

    The good news : Windows 10 really is a very nice operating system, and much nicer to use than Windows 7 once you've gotten past that learning curve. It's really not a steep learning curve.

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    1. I called the computer store yesterday, and he showed me how change the settings so that any pictures, documents, etc. automatically go into the larger drive that has 2 TB.
      He claimed there was no problem with bloatware. Yeah, right! The operating system drive was so full that I couldn't run the Photoshop program that I had installed! He showed me how to uninstall programs, and with much trepidation I deleted a bunch of stuff that was obviously junk.
      One thing that still angers me is that the Windows Media Player will no longer play DVDs. I can play music and rip CDs, but nothing else. On my old computers the Media Player worked with both commercial DVDs and the ones of travel photos that I had created, and even the files from my Video Studio program. I did some research, and found a lot of people complaining about the same issue. I will have to find a different media player to install (hopefully it won't take up much space!)
      Call me a dinosaur (which I am), but I never had all these problems when I bought the last computer, and I haven't found anything better about Windows 10 over Windows 7.
      Saludos,
      Bill

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    2. Your issue with Windows Media Player is now probably one with codecs. Again, this is not something to do with Microsoft or Windows 10! Chances are your old Win 7 unit came with (useful) codec bloatware, or someone installed a codec pack for you. It's easily solved. Install a fresh set of codecs!

      https://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

      Windows 10 offers noticeable performance improvements over Win 7. Once you've adjusted to it, you'll find Win 10 and 7 are far more alike than different when it comes to every day use.

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    3. Muchas gracias for that information, Gary. I installed the "codec" and the player is working.

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  2. And you should still install Disqus! Google comments is bloggers bloatware! :)

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    1. And why is it that I suddenly need a password in order to comment on your blog?

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    2. I've installed Disqus. It does have the option for a guest post.

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    3. I'll have to look again, but I didn't see any guest option.

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  3. You are not alone in the fight against bloatware! When we upgraded to Windows 10 a couple of weeks ago, my husband (thankfully, an IT guy), spent a couple of *hours* sorting through it all and deleting the programs we don't want/need.

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    1. Well, I went through yesterday and uninstalled a bunch of stuff that was obviously unwanted and unnecessary. However, I was afraid to delete some things for fear that it might be important for the operation of the computer. And then there were useless things (at least for me) that Microsoft would not allow me to delete... like a link to X-box! I now have 2.74 GB of free space on that disc.

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    2. Haha! It's funny you mention Xbox, because my husband was especially annoyed by that one too!

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